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Credo of a Passionate Skeptic

Essay & Poems in Remembrance of Adrienne Rich

Recently I collected a number of my prose writings for a forthcoming volume. Rereading them, it struck me that for some readers, the earlier pieces might seem to belong to a bygone era—twenty to thirty years ago. I chose to include them as background, indicating certain directions in my thinking. A burgeoning women’s movement in the 1970s and early 1980s incited and provided the occasions for them, created their ecology. But, as I suggested in “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” my thinking was unable to fulfill itself within feminism alone.

Our senses are currently whip-driven by a feverish new pace of technological change. The activities that mark us as human, though, don’t begin, exist in, or end by such a calculus. They pulse, fade out, and pulse again in human tissue, human nerves, and in the elemental humus of memory, dreams, and art, where there are no bygone eras. They are in us, they can speak to us, they can teach us if we desire it.

In fact, for Westerners to look back on 1900 is to come full face upon ourselves in 2000, still trying to grapple with the hectic power of capitalism and technology, the displacement of the social will into the accumulation of money and things. “Thus” (Karl Marx in 1844) “all physical and intellectual senses (are) replaced by the simple alienation of all these senses, the sense of having.” We have been here all along.

But retrospection can also remind us how one period’s necessary strategies can mutate into the monsters of a later time. The accurate feminist perceptions that women’s lives, historically or individually, were mostly unrecorded and that the personal is political are cases in point. Feminism has depended heavily on the concrete testimony of individual women, a testimony that was meant to accumulate toward collective understanding and practice. In “When We Dead Awaken,” I borrowed my title from Ibsen’s last play, written in 1900. Certainly the issues Ibsen had dramatized were very much alive. I “used myself” to illustrate a woman writer’s journey, rather tentatively. In 1971 this still seemed a questionable, even illegitimate, approach, especially in a paper to be given at an academic convention.

Soon thereafter, personal narrative was becoming valued as the true coin of feminist expression. At the same time, in every zone of public life, personal and private solutions were being marketed by a profit-driven corporate system, while collective action and even collective realities were mocked at best and at worst rendered historically sterile.

By the late 1990s, in mainstream American public discourse, personal anecdote was replacing critical argument, true confessions were foregrounding the discussion of ideas. A feminism that sought to engage race and colonialism, the global monoculture of United States corporate and military interests, the specific locations and agencies of women within all this was being countered by the marketing of a United States model of female—or feminine—self-involvement and self-improvement, devoid of political context or content.

Still, those early essays suggest the terrain where I started: a time of imaginative and intellectual ferment, when many kinds of transformations seemed possible. “Women and Honor” belongs to a period when there was in the air a theoretical code of ethical responsibility among women: a precarious solidarity of gender. Within that ethic—which I shared—I was trying to criticize the deceptions we practiced on each other and ourselves. Published at a time of vigorous feminist small-press pamphleteering, “Women and Honor” seemed, for a while, usable. Today, the parts that most interest me are the descriptions of how lying can disrupt the internal balance of the one who accepts the lie, and the difficulties of constructing an honorable life. I believe these stretch beyond gender to other hoped-for pacts, comradeships, and conversations, including those between the citizen and her government. (I do not believe that truth-telling exists in a bubble, sealed off from the desire for justice.)

Looking back on her own earlier writings, Susan Sontag has remarked: “Now the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, ‘unrealistic,’ to most people.” Like other serious and vibrant movements, feminism was to be countered by cultural patterns unforeseen before the 1980s: a growing middle-class self-absorption and indifference both to ideas and to the larger social order, along with the compression of media power and resources into fewer and fewer hands, during and beyond the Reagan years.

It interests me that in “Women and Honor,” that poetically terse piece of writing, I first invoked the name of Marx—to dismiss Marxism “for women.” I was of course echoing the standard anti-Marxism of the postwar American cultural and political mainstream. But, as I indicate in “Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marx,” written more than a decade later, this anti-Marxism, uncriticized and uninvestigated, was present also in the women’s movement. Marxism was tainted there, both by garden-variety anticommunism and by the fear that class would erase gender once again, when gender was just beginning to be understood as a political category.

Sometime around 1980 I felt impelled to go back and read what I had dismissed or felt threatened by: I had to find out what Marx, along the way of his own development, had actually written. I began working my way through those writings, in the assorted translations and editions available to me, an autodidact and an outsider, not an academic or post-Marx Marxist. There were passages that whetted my hunger; others I traversed laboriously and in intellectual fatigue. I understood that I was sometimes overhearing early nineteenth century German philosophical diatribes I could just as well skip.

What kept me going was the sense of being in the company of a great geographer of the human condition, and specifically, a sense of recognition: how profit-driven economic relations filter into zones of thought and feeling. Marx’s depiction of early nineteenth century capitalism and its dehumanizing effect on the social landscape rang truer than ever at the century’s end.

Along with that flare of recognition came profound respect and empathy for Marx’s restless vision of human capacities and the nature of their frustration. I found no blueprint for a future utopia but a skilled diagnosis of skewed and disfigured human relationships. I found a Marx who would have been revolted by Stalinism, by the expropriation of his ideas in the name of tyranny, by the expropriation of his name: “I am not a Marxist,” he said. In the feminism I had embraced, as in the social field where it was rooted, there was a salient dialectic: racism as destructive presence, race as great social teacher. Time and again racial actualities pushed against the “primary oppression” of gender; time and again the lesson was forgotten. I came to realize that we were afraid: that a focus on class (read Marxism) might blot out a focus on gender and race; that gender (feminism) might blot out race and class; that you could look at history and see the big eraser wiping out each successive lesson of justice, so that collective knowledge could not accumulate. For the pressing motif of this excessive society was and is: There is not enough (space, livelihood, validation) for all.

I’m not sure that I could have read Marx with so much patience and appetite had I not participated in the inevitable shortcomings of the feminist movement in the United States. Though some feminists (mostly women of color) insisted on intersections of race, class, and gender, emphasis was more often laid on women’s individual class identifications and how they negotiated them, or on poverty and welfare, than on how class, poverty and the need for welfare are produced and perpetuated in the first place. (Both kinds of work, of course, are necessary.) Elsewhere, movement was being parochialized into “women’s culture.” Meanwhile, the expansion of capitalism’s force field, the impoverishment of women within it, and the steep concentration of wealth were all brutally accelerating.

We can think of second-wave feminism as a splinter off the radical movements of United States history, especially the Depression-driven movements of the 1930s and 1940s, movements always under fire, repressed in the 1950s, resurgent in new forms in the 1960s, and by the 1970s, again being deliberately defused and isolated. Above all, the political groupings of African Americans were under hostile surveillance. Earlier, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.—both leaders with large constituencies—had been murdered just as each was unscrolling a map on which race and class intersected in a shared landscape. The blotting of those maps was accomplished by violence, persecution, censorship and propaganda. The energy, hopefulness, brains and passion of a women’s movement erupting in the United States at such a time was no match for these political circumstances. The important legacies of that movement reside not in the names of a few women starring in the media, but in the many lifesaving, stubbornly ongoing grass-roots organizations it had the power to ignite. I still believe what I wrote in 1971: A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution.

What prose I wrote in the 1990s was fired by a hope of bringing together ideas that had been forcibly severed from each other or thrown into competition: such as the making of literature and public education. Sometimes I felt ideas that attracted me mutually repelling each other. Or I felt the shortcomings of my own language pitted against a lethargic liberalism or a despicable rhetoric of “spin.” Sometimes it all seemed mere Sisyphean effort, pushing uphill and futureless a rock bearing sweaty handprints of so many others.

But Sisyphus is not, finally, a useful image. You don’t roll some unitary boulder of language or justice uphill; you try with others to assist in cutting and laying many stones, designing a foundation. One of the stonecutter-architects I met was Muriel Rukeyser, whose work I had begun reading in depth in the 1980s. Through her prose Rukeyser had engaged me intellectually; her poetry, however, in its range and daring, held me first and last. “Her Vision” is a tribute to the mentorship of her work. Another was Raya Dunayevskaya, who wrote vividly and trenchantly of the concrete revolutionary lives of women, and whose fusion of Marx’s humanism with contemporary feminisms expanded my sense of the possibilities of both.

I was also undertaking a kind of research into poetics, both as writing and as reading. I had always worked fairly instinctually and independently as a poet, distrusting groups and manifestos, which I found mostly unuseful in their exclusive male compadreship; I trusted their poetry more than their bondings. (I have had to reckon in and out of gender to do my work.) But it seemed to me that an accumulating incoherence and disruption of public language and images in the late twentieth century was something poets had to reckon with, not just for our own work. I had explored this challenge in my 1993 book, “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics.” I was looking for poetics and practice that could resist degraded media and a mass entertainment culture, both of them much more pervasive and powerful than earlier in the century.

There was nothing new about this; artists have long made art against the commodity culture. And innovative or transgressive art has itself been commodified, yet has dialectically frictioned new forms and imaginings into existence. One of the questions that pursued me is whether, and how, innovative or so-called avant-garde poetics are necessarily or even potentially revolutionary: Do they simply embrace a language so deracinated that it is privy in its rebellions only to a few? The question is not unreasonable given the decidedly antibourgeois, anticonformist claims of avant-garde tradition. The obverse question is inescapable: Can a radical social imagination clothe itself in a language worn thin by usage or debased by marketing, promotion and the will to power? In order to meet that will to power, must we choose between the nonreferential and the paraphrasable?

I believe in the necessity for a poetic language untethered from the compromised language of state and media. Yet how, I have wondered, can poetry persist as a ligatory art rather than as an echo chamber of fragmentation and alienation? Can the language of poetry become too abstract (some might say elitist) even as it tries to claim what Octavio Paz has called “the other voice”? Is there a way of writing on the edge? Of course I think there is, and has been; I test my own work from that likelihood. “Language,” I find in Marx, “is the presence of the community.” In a 1979 essay by Gary Snyder: “The community and its poetry are not two.”

Are writers, poets, artists, thinking people still merely gnashing away at the problems of the early twentieth century? But this is not “mere.” These primal, unsilenced questions pursue us, wherever we are trying to live conscientiously in the time we have. A new century, even a new technology, doesn’t of itself produce newness. It is live human beings, looking in all directions, who will do this.

For more than fifty years I have been writing, tearing, up, revising poems, studying poets from every culture and century available to me. I have been a poet of the oppositional imagination, meaning that I don’t think my only argument is with myself. My work is for people who want to imagine and claim wider horizons and carry on about them into the night, rather than rehearse the landlocked details of personal quandaries or the price for which the house next door just sold.

At times in the past decade and a half I have felt like a stranger in my own country. I seem not to speak the official language. I believe many others feel like this, not just as poets or intellectuals but as citizens—accountable yet excluded from power. I began as an American optimist, albeit a critical one, formed by our racial legacy and by the Vietnam War. In both these cases it was necessary to look hard truths in the face in order to change horrible realities. I believed, with many others, that my country’s historical aquifers were flowing in that direction of democratic change. I became an American skeptic, not as to the long search for justice and dignity, which is part of all human history, but in the light of my nation’s leading role in demoralizing and destabilizing that search, here at home and around the world. Perhaps just such a passionate skepticism, neither cynical nor nihilistic, is the ground for continuing.

Poems by Adrienne Rich

The following appeared in MR in May 2008, September 2007, November 2004, April 2010, November 2009, and September 2011, respectively.

Emergency Clinic

Caustic implacable poem unto and contra:

I do not soothe your minor injuries I do not offer I require close history of the case apprentice- ship in past and fresh catastrophe

The skin too quickly scabbed mutters for my debriding

For every bandaged wound I’ll scrape another open

I won’t smile while wiping your tears I do not give simplehearted love and nor allow you simply love me

Iodine-dark poem walking to and fro all night

If you accept regardless this will be different

un-gainly unreconciled

unto and contra

Director’s Notes

You don’t want a harsh outcry here not to violate the beauty yet dawn unveiling ochre village but to show coercion within that beauty, endurance required Begin with girl pulling hand over hand on chain only sound drag and creak in time it becomes monotonous

then must begin sense of unease produced by monotony repetitive motion, repetitive sound resistance, irritation increasing for the viewers sense of what they are here for anyway dislike of the whole thing how boring to watch (they aren’t used to duration this was a test)

Keep that dislike that boredom as a value also as risk so when bucket finally tinks at rim they breathe a sigh, not so much of relief as finally grasping what all this is for

dissolve as she dips from bucket

Five O’clock, January 2003

Tonight as cargoes of my young fellow countrymen and women are being hauled into positions aimed at death, positions they who did not will it suddenly have to assume I am thinking of Ed Azevedo half-awake in recovery if he has his arm whole and how much pain he must bear under the drugs On cliffs above a beach luxuriant in low tide after storms littered with driftwood hurled and piled and humanly arranged in fantastic installations and beyond silk-blue and onion-silver-skinned Jeffers’ “most glorious creature on earth” we passed, greeting, I saw his arm bandaged to the elbow asked and he told me: It was just a small cut, nothing, on the hand he’d washed in peroxide thinking that was it until the pain began traveling up his arm and then the antibiotics the splint the numbing drugs the sick sensation and this evening at five o’clock the emergency surgery and last summer the train from Czechoslovakia to Spain with his girl, cheap wine, bread and cheese room with a balcony, ocean like this nobody asking for pay in advance kindness of foreigners in that country, sick sensation now needing to sit in his brother’s truck again even the accident on the motorcycle was nothing like this I’ll be thinking of you at five this evening I said afterward you’ll feel better, your body will be clean of this poison I didn’t say Your war is here but could you have believed that from a small thing infection would crawl through the blood and the enormous ruffled shine of an ocean wouldn’t tell you.

—2003

You, Again

Some nights I think you want too much. From me. I didn’t ask to parse again your idioms of littered parking lots your chain-linked crane-hung sites limp again through your crime-scene-festooned streets to buildings I used to live in. Lose my nerve at a wrong door on the wrong floor in search of a time. The precision of dream is not such a privilege. I know those hallways tiled in patterns of oriental rugs those accordion-pleated elevator gates. Know by heart the chipped edges on some of those tiles. You who require this heart-squandering want me wandering you, craving to press a doorbell hear a lock turn, a bolt slide back —always too much, over and over back to the old apartment, wrong again, the key maybe left with a super who rules the dream and will not be found

Ballade of the Poverties

There’s the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted toilet bowl The poverty of to steal food for the first time The poverty of to mouth a penis for a paycheck The poverty of sweet charity ladling Soup for the poor who must always be there for that There’s the poverty of theory poverty of the swollen belly shamed Poverty of the diploma mill the ballot that goes nowhere Princes of predation let me tell you There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of cheap luggage bursted open at immigration The poverty of the turned head, the averted eyes The poverty of bored sex of tormented sex The poverty of the bounced check the poverty of the dumpster dive The poverty of the pawned horn the poverty of the smashed reading glasses The poverty pushing the sheeted gurney the poverty cleaning up the puke The poverty of the pavement artist the poverty passed-out on pavement Princes of finance you who have not lain there There are poverties and there are poverties

There is the poverty of hand-to-mouth and door-to-door And the poverty of stories patched-up to sell there There’s the poverty of the child thumbing the Interstate And the poverty of the bride enlisting for war There’s the poverty of prescriptions who can afford And the poverty of how would you ever end it There is the poverty of stones fisted in pocket And the poverty of the village bulldozed to rubble Princes of weaponry who have not ever tasted war There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of wages wired for the funeral you Can’t get to the poverty of the salary cut There’s the poverty of human labor offered silently on the curb The poverty of the no-contact prison visit There’s the poverty of yard sale scrapings spread And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on street Prince let me tell you who will never learn through words There are poverties and there are poverties

You who travel by private jet like a housefly Buzzing with the other flies of plundered poverties Princes and courtiers who will never learn through words Here’s a mirror you can look into: take it: it’s yours.

For Jim and Arlene Scully with gratitude to François Villon and to Galway Kinnell